Time of flight (TOF) methods for depth detection may be utilized to determine a depth or a distance of a target from a display or other device. A microelectromechanical system (MEMS) laser beam display may incorporate a modulated infrared (IR) light source to dispatch multiple interrogation pulses onto a target during predetermined slots in the scanning cycle. The reflected pulses are detected, and the difference in time between a pulse trigger and the return pulse, the time of flight, is determined. The round trip distance may be calculated using the speed of light so that the depth or distance to the target may be determined. With a spatially separated high rate of IR interrogation pulses, the computed depth data when rasterized using the scanning parameters yields a depth map of the display field of view (FOV) or a sub-region in the FOV that may be determined programmatically. The spatial resolution of the depth map might be limited by the cumulative latencies in the IR pulsing and TOF detector circuitries and scanning parameters of the display. To obtain a higher resolution fine depth map, might require multiple IR laser diodes and or duplication of components in the receive circuitry. Alternatively, oversampling with a single IR laser beam may yield a higher resolution depth map but would increase the processing latency (reduced frame rate of depth map acquisition) and impede low latency gesture recognition in the FOV. Gesture recognition and 3D image capture in general may benefit from a low latency higher resolution depth map without the overheads in the approaches described above.
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